Canada moves to implement cover-up - Now is the time to demand
international participation in Gustafsen inquiry

From Settlers In Support of Indigenous Sovereignty (SISIS),
7 August 1997

High ranking Canadian government officials and other unindicted
co-conspirators involved in an illegal paramilitary operation against
indigenous Shuswap traditionalists are scrambling to contain an escalating
political crisis. Both federal and provincial governments are co-ordinating
a damage control strategy of cover-up, containment and evasion in the face
of mounting international alarm over Canada's attacks upon aboriginals
during the summmer of 1995.

For 31 days, a small but determined group of traditionalists and
their supporters held off the largest joint military/police operation in
Canadian history. The site, sacred Sundance and burial grounds at Ts'peten
(also known as Gustafsen Lake, near 100 Mile House British Columbia), is
located on unceded, unsurrendered Shuswap traditional territory. A vast
American owned cattle company attempted to evict the Sundancers, claiming
ownership rights to the sacred site. However, as a settled and binding
matter of both constitutional and international law, the absence of either
a treaty or sale negates this claim. A call for international adjudication
of this dispute was peremptorally rejected by BC's Attorney General Ujjal
Dosanjh.

During the month-long summer standoff, the authorities employed an
FBI psy-ops specialist, fired approximately 77,000 rounds of hollow-point
ammunition, blew up a camp vehicle with a land mine, and conducted a
vicious campaign of racist, media demonization against natives they called
"terrorists," "renegades," and "squatters". Canada's national broadcaster
the CBC participated in the RCMP's "Operational Plan" by directing a
"psy-ops" broadcast into the camp, which the trial revealed was designed to
provoke the Sundancers into a response against which the authorities could
react with deadly force.

The recently concluded trial in a special "anti-terrorist" high
security courtroom in Surrey BC, near Vancouver, was the longest criminal
trial ever held in Canada and has been described by many observers as "a
travesty of justice". Fifteen people were convicted and twelve imprisoned
after bizarre and protracted proceedings which included the jailing of an
internationally respected authority on native rights, Dr.Bruce Clark, the
dismissal without reasons of key defence arguments in the final stages of
the trial, and a four day steering session by the judge in a blatant
display of jury tampering just before they were sequestered.

Clark is a legal scholar and an acknowledged expert on the subject
of aboriginal rights law and Canadian constitutional history who argues
that the present practices of the Canadian government and courts constitute
"fraud", "constitutional treason" and "genocide".

"Canada is always first in line when it comes to pontificating and
uttering sanctimonious platitudes about genocide in places in Bosnia, but
not when it occurs at home," Clark said in a recent interview with Canadian
Press. According to Dr. Clark and the indigenous traditionalists for whom
he acts, independent, international intervention and adjudication is the
only answer to a continuing genocidal colonization process.

Despite the best attempts of the BC Supreme Court and Attorney
General, clear evidence emerged in the Gustafsen trial through selected
portions of more than 50 hours of police video-taped documentation and
other disclosures that the highest levels of the Canadian state planned and
participated in a coordinated process of criminal conspiracy to kill the
occupants of the Ts'peten Sundance camp, smear the person and arguments of
their counsel Dr. Clark and suppress the legal arguments put forward. BC
even attempted to have Clark disbarred, but the Law Society of Upper Canada
vindicated him, stating: "The genocide of which Dr. Clark speaks is real.
We are sympathetic moreover to his assertion that the courts have been
unwilling to hear his arguments."

The arguments place a cloud on land title across the province of
British Columbia and throughout much of Canada. The magnitude of the
corruption and the revelations of the authorities' actions are so alarming
that Gustafsen Lake has become something of an international cause celebre.
Eminent human rights activists such as former US Attorney-General Ramsey
Clark, the European Parliament's Green Group, and Indigenous organizations
and representatives around the world have expressed outrage and demanded a
comprehensive public inquiry with international supervision.

Most recently, 140 Department of Indian Affairs Band Council Chiefs
signed a petition demanding an inquiry into "attempted murder against the
Indian people" at Gustafsen Lake. Phil Fontaine, the newly elected Grand
Chief of Canada's Assembly of First Nations, has also joined the inquiry
call into "all aspects" of the Gustafsen Lake operation as well as into the
Ipperwash incident, in which police opened fire upon peaceful protestors
protecting a burial area in Ontario in 1995, killing one of them.

Members of BC's Native Youth Movement have promised "general
mayhem" at the jailing of "someone who was defending their rights." The
harshest sentence was reserved for a 66 year old Shuswap elder called
Wolverine, imprisoned since the standoff ended. The organic farmer and old
age pensioner was charged with attempted murder for attempting to shoot out
the tires of a fourteen ton armoured personnel carrier which was attempting
to run him down. He was sentenced to 8 years for the lesser charge of
"mischief endangering life".

As the clamour for an internationally supervised inquiry grows, the
perpetrators are already attempting to set the parameters to contain and
domesticate any inquiry which takes place. The August 2 Vancouver Sun
editorial supported the "stern sentencing", but conceded that "citizens
should have their questions answered fully and publicly without a long,
expensive public inquiry." They support instead using a complaints
procedure recently developed by the BC government.

According to the Sun, "Attorney General Ujjal Dosanjh wrote to
Solicitor General Andy Scott two weeks ago, proposing specific amendments
to the RCMP Act that would make the force subject to BC's complaint
procedures." This follows recommendations by BC Supreme Court Justice Wally
Oppal that "a single independent commission to handle complaints about
every police force. Unfortunately the RCMP hasn't signed on."

The RCMP is a federal force and is presently accountable "to a
complaint process that's based in Ottawa," a process that according to
Justice Oppal "makes no sense". Oppal has a vested interest in keeping any
investigation of Gustafsen Lake inside BC; he is himself one of the
unindicted BC judiciary who stonewalled the jurisdictional arguments of Dr.
Clark in a related case in 1994. Oppal says it is "crucial" that the force
be "accountable to the same police complaint commissioner who will oversee
municipal police forces and answer to the BC legislature."

This is a frightening thought given that the members of that
corrupt colonialist body enthusiastically cheered on the 1995 invasion
force into Shuswap territory. At the time, the ruling New Democratic Party
government fomented and manipulated anti-Indian racism to the government's
advantage in an attempt to demonstrate "firmness" and secure re-election in
BC's interior "redneck" ridings.

Attorney General and Human Rights Minister Dosanjh, the NDP
politician in charge of the RCMP in BC, is now desperately attempting to
ensure the inevitable inquiry stays safely home in BC. The existing
federally based complaint mechanism "risks undermining public confidence in
our justice system," he maintains.

Dosanjh rejected international observers at the time of the
standoff, asserting "there shall be no alien intervention in the affairs of
the state". Now it seems, even Ottawa is not to be trusted to air the dirty
laundry of genocide, even though the Prime Minister, the federal Defence
Minister, the Solicitor General, the Governor General, the Commissioner of
the RCMP, and high ranking military officials were also revealed to have
been deeply complicit in the Gustafsen crisis.

We say a plague on both their houses. It is patently obvious that
neither the federal nor provincial governmnets can be trusted to deal in an
impartial manner with the issue and as pointed out, are themselves criminal
co-conspirators and parties to the genocide alleged. These colonialist
criminals shall not investigate themselves this time. We demand an
independent, impartial, international third party to ensure a thorough and
fair result.

Free the Ts'peten Defenders; End Canadian Colonialism
Demand an internationally supervised independent public inquiry into
-----------------Canada's actions at Gustafsen Lake-----------------

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